Ok, this is a bit hard to confess, but I sold myself out, so to speak,
kind of. I went and bought an Xbox 360. I couldn't resist the alluring
siren song of the console anylonger, given how many great games are
published only for the consoles and not for Windows, and given that the
Xbox 360 supports a VGA monitor with a cable.

  Getting to finally play all those games whose covers I have only been able
to watch at the store is only one of the benefits, of course. From all the
Windows games I own, *at least* half of them present random crashing, hangups
or other malfunction (I don't know if it's a problem with the games
themselves, the different hardware drivers, the hardware itself, or a
combination), and my PC is becoming so old that it struggles running the
more recent games at even decent framerates with decent quality settings.
While I have never paid much attention to such talk, it is in practice so
that with the Xbox 360 it's just a relief that you can simply put the disc
in and play without having to worry at all about crashes, graphics settings,
latest drivers and whether your PC will be able to run it at all. Microsoft
has also made a quite good work at demanding game developers to minimize
loading times even when loading from DVD, because it really makes a big
difference: Sometimes Xbox 360 games seem to load from the DVD *faster*
than they seem to load from the HD in the PC, as incredible as that might
sound... (I don't really understand how they succeed in this, and why they
don't use the same technique in the Windows ports of the games, when they
exist.)

  Of course there are drawbacks too. For one, games deliberately have no
support for mouse and keyboard, even though the console would support them
(eg. you can plug in an USB keyboard and use it to write in the dashboard;
I'm assuming supporting USB mice is there or at least would be equally easy).
That means no FPS games for me. (Yes, I tried a few demos, and they were
next to impossible to play.) AFAIK this is a deliberate guideline by Microsoft
(or at least it was for the Xbox). Many of these FPS games are published for
both the Xbox 360 and Windows, and they don't have any problems in supporting
keyboard+mouse in the latter; they just deliberately don't support them in
the Xbox 360. Well, it's both their and my loss, because I won't be buying
FPS games (which is a shame really, because many of them *look* really great).

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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